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Constance Alexander: High school English teachers — Do not go gentle into that good night


There used to be at least one in every high school, the unflinching English teacher who guided students out of the abyss of grammatical and literary ignorance to the heights of intellectual acuity and written precision. They did their jobs with passion, bullying and cajoling us to improve, enjoy, and eventually relish words that lift off the page, giving true meaning to the term “Language Arts.”

Years after we slogged through their assignments — some of us fighting their crusades against such offenses as split infinitives and the comma splice — they are the ones we remember and thank belatedly for their zeal.

In my high school, more than fifty years after they retired, Miss Haitsch, Mr. Morgan, and Miss Anker remain the most lauded Metuchen High School English teachers, as demonstrated by responses to a recent Facebook post.

Senior year, the divine Miss H. made us memorize the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, a feat many can still recite, verbatim. She loved teaching Shakespeare too, leaving some of us with the impression that she had a bit of Lady Macbeth lurking behind the red lipstick and crimped, pageboy coif. Although she provided us with ample opportunity for mimicry behind her back, she somehow earned our respect by luring us into her world at classtime.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Junior year was American Lit. with John Morgan who, according to Susan Urmey, gave “tough but thoughtful writing assignments.” Some former students recall the prompts for the bi-weekly essays. Steve Ossad mentioned, “One friend in life is much, two is many, three hardly possible.” Bob Stokes recalled having to analyze a Nietzsche quote: “All truth is simple. Is that not a double lie?”

Another MHS alum, George Coss, rendered English teacher Miss Anker and “all others 9 thru 12 pretty useless,” declaring that a Technical Writing course in college was more relevant to his interests. He went on to assert an abiding preference to biographies and history, rather than “the so-called classics.”

Laurie Malpass Edminster, a gifted veteran English teacher at Murray High School, did not need any prodding to reflect on her former teachers and what she learned from them. “My 10-12 teachers were fabulous,” she claimed, adding that there were too many readings to post them all. “But I was so inspired by my high school English teachers that I became one myself,” she said.

Many of the memorable readings fell into the category of classics, including The Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Their Eyes were Watching God, Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, Great Expectations, Beowulf, The Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Stranger, The Brothers Karamazov, and the list goes on.

High School English was not all reading and writing essays and research papers. Kentucky writer Lynn Pruett remembered Ms. Clarke, who “taught us grammar and let me write creative papers instead of straight up criticism.”

Susan Page Tillett, a writer and recently retired executive director of the Mesa Refuge, an artists’ community in the San Francisco Bay Area, described her English teacher, Mr. Scott, as “brilliant, young-ish and passionate about the work…and about us.”

Constance Alexander is a columnist, award-winning poet and playwright, and President of INTEXCommunications in Murray. She can be reached at constancealexander@twc.com. Or visit www.constancealexander.com.

Tillett remembered feeling “deeply seen and heard. He taught me to develop my response to reading with clarity and to relate it to what I was thinking and living through at the time.”

Librarian extraordinaire Linda Hunt Bartnik found senior English most memorable because of T.S. Eliot. Other favorites were Hamlet, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and William Butler Yeats. Most thrilling was getting to read her own stories to the class. When she looked up and realized they were listening, it made an impression. “That moment had tremendous impact on me,” she said.

Growing up in Louisiana, Kathryn Coon Harper had Mrs. Bower, whose sentence diagrams “looked ike Indiana Jones Holy Grail hunting maps. Diagramming a sentence,” Harper explained, “actually worked for my right-brained way of learning.”

Readers whose high school days were not so long ago added other reflections on English teachers. Cassidy Zirkel, a Texan who attended Murray State’s Commonwealth Honors Academy about five years ago, appreciated the books she read in Marcella Rokicki Hayden’s class. Even more important, however, was “learning to respect different thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values. She taught us more than any other class about being great humans,” Zirkel concluded.

Kristen Oakley credits professors at Murray State for undoing some of the negative takeaways from high school English classes. “I think the most damaging thing I learned in high school English was that there was a right way to interpret a literary work. We were kind of taught with the mindset that there was always one interpretation of a work we were supposed to figure out and arrive at, and that conception was definitely out the window once I got to MSU,” she said.

With teachers leaving the profession at record rates and unfilled vacancies proliferating, one wonders if future graduates will be able to boast about all they learned in high school. English teachers and librarians are particularly under fire for guiding young adults to think for themselves.

One startling example, reported in the Daily Yonder, is a former Kentucky Teacher of the Year from rural Montgomery County, Willie Carver, who resigned because the school’s administration caved into ridiculous parents’ baseless and offensive allegations. For instance, when Carver showed a TedTalk by “a woman…who looked masculine” one parent objected because their child said, ‘they’re making us watch trans people.’”

The presenter, according to Carver, was not trans.

A parent also objected to a reading because it was by a Black author.

Another problem arose because of a quiz he gave where students were to identify whether a quote was from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche or a Dolly Parton lyric that declared, “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.”

Carver’s departure from teaching at a public high school comes at a time when a teacher shortage is making increasingly negative impact on rural schools, according to a brief published by the National Conference of State Legislators. Not only is enrollment in teacher training programs declining, thirty-nine percent of schools that are more than 25 miles from an urban center are struggling to fill vacancies.

Author’s note: A follow-up article will include additional responses to the Facebook query about recollections of high school English classes.


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